From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 09:38:14 MST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harvey Newstrom
> Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2002 1:53 AM
>
> spike66 asked,
> > What were the sixties about?
Having grown up in the 60s*, I've thought about this question a lot.
[* I was 13 in 1970, but had an older brother with whom I tagged along
into some of the core experiences people associate with "the 60s."
Also, as Damien B points out, "the 60s" really didn't begin until 1962-4
or so and didn't end until some time in the early- to mid-70s.]
> The sixties were very much a transhumanist movement before
> today's version. It was not technology-based, but was idea
> based. Radical new ideas abounded. One idea was that one
> could let one's hair grow as long as you wanted and that you
> could look the way you wanted. Everyone could choose for
> themselves. Another idea was that you could love whomever
> you wanted and that old rigid social systems should be
> abolished. Again, people could choose for themselves.
> Another was that there might be new ways of thinking.
> Political theories, social theories, new-age theories, new
> artistic movements, new musical movements, even new drug
> movements, all involved new ways of thinking.
>
> A whole generation woke up and decided that if they didn't
> like the way things were that they could change the world.
> There was no reason to grow up in a stereotyped world to
> become stereotyped people. Every individual was allowed to
> choose for themselves what they would become, what they would
> look like, how they would act, and how they would associate
> with others. Old rules about race, religion, morality,
> expectations, traditions, and habits were tossed out on their
> ear. Everybody tried to figure out what they would do if
> they were designing the whole world from scratch. New art
> forms appeared, new music appeared, new fashion styles
> appeared, new drugs appeared, new family groups and
> relationships appeared, new political theories appeared, new
> religions appeared, new causes appeared, anything that could
> be tried was tried.
>
> The whole "New Age" movement was based on the idea that we
> were no longer limited by history and the way things were.
> We had enough knowledge and capability to remake the whole
> world, including ourselves, into any image we desired. A
> million different versions of remaking the New Age appeared.
> Religions, drugs, ecology, free-love, and politics were just
> some of the tools used to try to remake the world. Everybody
> tried to invent their own version of utopia and convince
> every one else to transcend previous limitations to become
> something new.
>
> It sounded very much like the stuff I hear on this list. I
> think the current transhumanist movement is really just an
> echo of the sixties. We are just using more technology in
> today's version.
[snip the rest of Harvey's very good post ...]
I think Harvey's right on with his observations. There's also a lot of
truth in Ron h.'s and Eliezer's posts, as well. I'll share some more or
less random thoughts with their posts in mind.
First, as Ron h. points out, many of the ideas and social trends that
people identify with "the 60s" had their roots much earlier. I often
get into deep woolgathering following the strands back in time. The
most obvious and immediate precursors of what many people think of as
the phenomena of "the 60s" were the "Beats," who I've spent a lot of
time studying (and perhaps too much of my late teens and early twenties
trying to emulate). If you really want to understand the 60s in
America, at least, you have to understand Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg
and "Dean Moriarity" and their crowd. You have to read "On the Road"
and "Gravity's Rainbow" and listen to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie
and Thelonius Monk and take long road trips across the desert. If you
can do all that in a 1953 Oldsmobile, all the better.
Another thread you have to pick up is Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley. You
can read "The Doors of Perception" and "Be Here Now" and "Flashbacks"
and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," but a lot of what was going on by
1966 or so will be opaque to you if you don't actually "walk with the
king." 'nuff said.
These threads weave back in time through the loom of the second World
War into the wanderings of "the Lost Generation," and the earlier fabric
of the first World War. You need to read "The Razor's Edge" and "A
Moveable Feast" and imagine the mind-smashing insanity of the trenches
and the flower of a generation ground into the mud of the Ardennes. In
that era you have to feel the energy of the cubists and revolution of
"Finnegan's Wake" and "the Hollow Men," and know that this is the way
the world ends, this is the way the world ends. And you have to ride
with Vladimir Illich on the sealed train into the cold of a Russian
winter with a burning ideal that can smash the past with science,
science, science and feel the stirrings of hope in the hearts of recent
American immigrants, new intellectuals with the vision of a utopia built
upon the bones of the czars and sing the Internationale in a hundred
tongues and ten million voices and all of this before the gulags, before
the butcher, before the cold set back in, in the shadow of Hiroshima . .
.
Oops, sorry, that desert road trip rhythm got back into my fingers ...
So, where was I? Oh yes ...
So Eliezer's right, that the 1960s were (almost) the second generation
after the GI Bill college kids (really a second memetic, but not quite a
second genetic generation). By then the West had had 150 years of
"modernism" and the concept of "the modern" had become the ground of
being, had seeped into every nook and cranny of culture. Pour into that
mix an exploding ideology of "cognitive liberty" with a chemical tool
kit for actually reaching some of the basic neurotransmitter pathways in
the brain, along with a set of memetic tools to play with -- free verse,
abstract expressionist painting, be-bop jazz, syncretistic
cross-culturalism -- and you got an expanding wavefront passing through
a generation in adolescence just at the time that the birth control pill
was becoming commonplace. Now vibrate the mixture with the new
synthesis of jazz, blues and hillbilly music that found a beat and
rhythm that perfectly catalyzed the mixture and -- BOOM -- SEX, DRUGS
and ROCK N'ROLL ...
Which all got too confusing and of course couldn't really make sense
when there were so many painful distractions: A western intelligentsia
that couldn't shake the romance of Marxism; a war that was fought in a
bizarre compromised way with the wrong tactics and muddied rationales;
an industrial technology that was still in the last part of its first
phases, and therefore dirty and ugly and dehumanizing, just to name a
few. Huxley's famous "summit meeting" with Leary before the former
finally died, in which he urged caution so that the real potential of
the new mind-drugs could be developed before they were poured out into
the world was a failure. By 1975 the fireworks show had turned into a
confusing conflagration and people were scared and tired. And anyway,
you have to come down from the mountain eventually. The freedom
marchers had done everything they could do and now the hard work of
assimilation and learning long-term fairness was there in front of us
and there weren't any clear voices about how to do that work.
But then, that's just one trajectory through the '60s. There were
others. There was Selma and King and George C. Wallace. There were the
Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and the smell of leaded gasoline being
burned very fast in a 427 or a Hemi. And that's just America. In
France there was the summer of 1968, and in Czechoslovakia there was the
Prague Spring. Oh, and then there was Gagarin and Glenn and Armstrong
and One Small Step, above it all and, sadly, somehow disconnected from
it all.
So, spike, what was your question? Oh, yes ...
I very much agree with Harvey that transhumanism can claim to be the
legitimate descendant of much of what was best about "the 60s" -- the
adventurism, the energy, the ideals of ultimate liberty and exploration.
But that's a post for another day, I think ...
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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